Shaughnessy

"Introduction to Errors and Expectations" 

Mina P. Shaughnessy

Pages 387-396

In this introduction to her 1977 text Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy describes the learning struggles of students who are often identified as needing remedial work due to the level of error (grammatical, syntactical, and structural), in their work. To Shaughnessy, these students are not beyond learning, or uneducable, but are beginner writers who commit errors simply “because they are beginners” (390). In other words, this particular category of students is unprepared, unfamiliar with academia, and confused how to use written language. In order to enable students to write with less errors, Shaughnessy proposes that teachers should resolve to understand why students are making the kind of errors that they are in order to assist them with their development as a writer. Additionally, writing problems should be molded to the needs of a particular college’s student population, and not as an answer to “learning problems” (391).

In her discussion of error, she observes that BW (basic writing) students are haunted by an awareness of their errors while they’re writing. Shaughnessy’s insight that BW students equate “ ‘good writing’ ” to “ ‘correct writing’ ” (392) is still true today. My students that identify themselves as poor writers are always more concerned with their grammar and spelling rather than the content of their paper. Out of a paper worth 125 points, I make grammar and spelling worth 15 points. I stress that I’m more concerned with the content and professional presentation of their paper, rather than grammatical and spelling errors. Nevertheless, some students still confess their anxieties about their errors during conferences.

However, perhaps they still do this because they are aware of what Shaughnessy identifies as “the economics of energy in the writing situation” (394). In the relationship between audience and writer, each party wants to dedicate as little energy as possible to the other. While with using verbal language we can utilize gestures, facial expressions and more to get our point(s) across, written language is one-dimensional. What a reader reads on the page is all the writer can say at that moment.  A reader’s attention is distracted when encountering errors, as “they demand energy without giving any return in meaning” (395).

As Shaughnessy notes, it’s easy for instructors to say that errors don’t matter in the end because language structures are arbitrary in nature (392). However, this isn’t true--errors do matter, because we use the presence of errors as a meter for judging the quality of writing. Shaughnessy makes an excellent point when she notes that students who are beginning writers have more obstacles to overcome than more advanced and prepared students(395).  Additionally, students need to write without errors in order to represent themselves as intelligent and intellectually developed individuals to others, including future employers. These errors are not just a problem for the classroom, but also beyond the classroom.